My Grandmother and I Never Saw Eye to Eye—Until I Wrote My Novel

The first time my Nai Nai told me that she didn’t love me, it was over the phone. “I don’t love you like your grandfather,” she said. “Your grandfather loves you. I love you because I must, because I love him and he loves you.”

I laughed, a weak attempt to repel her words. Our relationship had been precarious for years, but I was still surprised to find that her confession hurt.

When my parents immigrated to the United States, they left me in the care of my father’s parents, my Ye Ye and Nai Nai. At two years old, I interpreted my parents’ departure as rejection. In the days, weeks, and months after, I threw myself to the floor in fits. I raged and howled. No one could utter the word mother around me without fearing my retaliation. For all those times, my Ye Ye and Nai Nai patiently dealt with the aftermath, coaxing me back to a despondent calm.

A few years later, it was my turn to go to the Beautiful Country. I know that my Ye Ye was heartbroken to see me leave; he had doted on me since I was born. But I can’t picture my Nai Nai’s reaction. She was a short woman with a face as big as a plate and long, thin lips that were always pressed together, like she was forever holding back something she wanted to say. Real or imagined, this is how I see her to this day.

When I was eight, my grandparents visited us in our new home in Oxford, Mississippi. By then, my skin was golden from sweaty afternoons spent tearing through the Ole Miss campus on my Huffy bike. I was a rascal, with rancid sneakers that I wore without socks and mosquito bites down my arms. When my Ye Ye and Nai Nai arrived, I greeted them casually, with a mouthful of English. I could tell that they were horrified—this was not the precious child they remembered. My Chinese was slow, difficult to reach. They were disappointed in me, my Nai Nai especially. Whatever vision she’d had for her granddaughter, I was far from it. I knew this, and I resented her for it.

You must see where this is going. The divide between the child and the elder grows, so separated by land, ocean, time. The child eschews and renounces her heritage. The tunneling pain of diaspora. Yes, all of that is true and happened to me. But this is not the kind of story that lingers on the loss. This is a story about what has been found.

*

Nai Nai was a strict woman. Unlike my Ye Ye, she did not shower me with adoration and food. Instead, she was the kind of person to take away my plate after only a few pieces of meat. She liked to lecture everyone; she was a teacher, then a superintendent, for most of her life. As the “lost cause” granddaughter who was becoming too American, I received the brunt of these lectures.

One of them involved the retelling of her favorite book, Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin. Published in the eighteenth century, the book chronicles the rise and fall of a family loosely modeled after the author’s own. Dream of the Red Chamber is one of China’s Four Great Classical Novels—its impact is so colossal that an entire academic study has formed around it, called Redology.

In particular, it is remembered for the tragic love triangle at the center of the story. Jia Baoyu, treasured son of the Jia family, finds himself in love with his younger cousin, Lin Daiyu. However, due to Lin Daiyu’s sickly nature, Jia Baoyu’s family tricks him into marrying another cousin, Xue Baochai. When Lin Daiyu discovers this, she dies, finally overcome by the consumption that has haunted her all her life.

My Nai Nai told me this story during one of my visits home to Changchun: “I want you to know it because it is full of good lessons about morality and the nature of human beings.” After every few sentences, she would pause and ask me if I understood.

Back then, I listened half-heartedly. This was not a sacred exchange of information between an elder and a grandchild. To me, it was the same kind of nagging lecturing she had done all my life about how I should behave and who I should be. To her, I was a single twenty-something with nothing but an English major, some entry-level job, and no real plans for the future other than to “be a writer” at some undetermined point in time.

“She needs to go back to school,” my Ye Ye told my father. “Or she needs to come back to China and find a job here.” I knew that my Nai Nai was at the root of all this disapproval—in her eyes, I had always been directionless. I would always need to be reigned in.

By my next visit to Changchun in 2018, my grandparents had moved to a new apartment in a nicer neighborhood. The Wi-Fi there was slow, further choked by China’s aggressive firewall. To pass the time, I chronicled my days with the hope of turning my notes into short stories and essays for my MFA thesis. My Ye Ye, who was delighted by my presence, often interrupted me during these sessions—he wanted me to go look at old family albums with him instead.

“No one should bother her when she is writing,” my Nai Nai commanded him, to my surprise. “She needs her full focus and concentration.”

The next morning, I ventured out of my bedroom and sat next to my Nai Nai on the couch, writing as she watched her medical talk shows. She snatched my notebook away from me, held it out in front of her. “Let me assess what you are writing.”

A moment passed before she set it down again with a short chuckle. “I am pretending to understand it, but the truth is I can’t.”

“No one should bother her when she is writing,” my Nai Nai commanded him, to my surprise. “She needs her full focus and concentration.”

*

In the last semester of my MFA program in Wyoming, I began writing my debut novel, Four Treasures of the Sky. My main character, a thirteen-year-old girl, is kidnapped from her home in Zhifu, China, and shipped across the ocean to a brothel in San Francisco. Without putting much thought into it, I decided to name her Daiyu, the same name as the woman in Dream of the Red Chamber.

It was a meaningless choice, a placeholder name. But as I continued to write the story, I realized that my main character’s name was one of the most—if not the most—important things about her. Being named after a tragic character from a famous novel can be a sort of curse, an essential question of fate versus agency. I turned this into one of the novel’s core explorations.

“Your father tells us you’re writing a book,” Nai Nai said on the phone. “I want to make sure that you are writing something that is inherently good. Do you understand the difference between something that is bad and something that is good?”

For once, I was not annoyed by her impending lecture. Perhaps it was because I was thinking about these things too. I told her I was incorporating her beloved Dream of the Red Chamber and Lin Daiyu into my own story, convinced that it would tell her everything about the kind of “good” book I was writing.

“Ah? How are you using it? Tell your Nai Nai.” There was a concession in her voice, one I had never heard before.

“I can’t really explain it well in Chinese.” I was thinking about the symbolism, the layered storylines.

“Try.”

I began reading Dream of the Red Chamber and Redology scholarship for research. The copy I had was an English translation and I thought the prose strange and often tedious, but I still found myself enjoying the story and its many characters, especially Lin Daiyu.

At the same time, I couldn’t imagine my grandmother reading the book in all the phases of her life: as a ferocious young woman, then a middle-aged mother of three, and finally a white-haired grandmother. The book was dramatic and occasionally lewd, and it seemed impossible to me that the Nai Nai I knew could be a person who encountered this book and loved it for the rest of her life, so much so that she read it every year.

“It’s entertaining,” I told her on our next phone call. “There are so many characters.”

“Yes, there are,” she agreed. “But are you understanding the moral and philosophical lessons of the book?”

“I’m not sure,” I told her.

“When you finish,” she said, “ask me. I’ll explain it all to you. Your Nai Nai is an expert in this book, don’t you know?”

Something was beginning to change between us. Where I had once dreaded our phone calls, I was now calling my grandparents regularly, excited to talk with my Nai Nai about the book. She asked me about the story, its characters, the moral quandaries and real-world implications. I used a Chinese-English translation app to try to explain it all to her.

“Zhang Hongxing,” she said, using my xiaoming, “you have chosen the hardest task of them all.”

She asked me if I was taking care of myself. “The most important thing,” she said, “is to protect the mind. None of this can happen without your mind.”

She told me to work hard, but not too hard. To rest often. “I’m going to speak with your parents,” she said, “and tell them that everything must be in service of you finishing the book.” I agreed.

It was strange to me. When my friends asked about the book, I gave them surface-level updates, not wanting to bog them down with craft-related technicalities. When my parents asked, I gave them overly optimistic assessments that belied the true nature of my anxieties and frustrations. But when my Nai Nai asked me about the book, I felt compelled to tell her the truth: that I was scared, but that I was trying.

She was the only one who got it, I thought. Maybe it was because we were connected through Dream of the Red Chamber. Or maybe it was because, through my writing of the book, we had finally found a language upon which we both agreed. And in that language, there was one more thing for me to discover: that I had been hurt by her, yes, but that I was not innocent either.

“The most important thing,” she said, “is to protect the mind. None of this can happen without your mind.”

When I talk with other 1.5-generation friends, we joke about how we must all be disappointments to the elders in our home countries. There are many losses we share: loss of language, loss of culture, loss of connection. The jokes are flimsy attempts at masking our sobering reality: What we gain from a new country, we lose from another.

In my book, one of my main character’s motivations is to go back to China to reunite with her grandmother. Perhaps, because of this, I have been thinking about the perspective of the grandmother. What she lost in her granddaughter leaving.

I wonder if we underestimate the impact of our leaving on those we leave behind. There is so much attention paid to The Arrival in America: the racism we face, the hardships of assimilation, the eventual Americanization of self. But what we may forget is what and who we leave behind. How difficult it is for the people who loved us, who once cared for us, to see us leave physically, culturally, linguistically. Can we blame them for disapproving and lecturing? Can we blame them for missing us so much?

The truth that I often forget: After my parents left, it was my Nai Nai who clothed me in three layers of sweaters before sending me outside, who brewed medicine for me to drink. It was my Nai Nai who watched me with a hawkish eye, and it was also she who found me after my parents left, alone and wailing in the bedroom. It was she who calmed me down.

“I love you because I must,” she had said. Must is a funny word. It conveys inevitability, responsibility. Implied in the usage of must is the threat of a possible failure: What will happen if what must happen doesn’t?

“After your parents left, I looked at you and I felt great sorrow for you,” my Nai Nai once told me. “A child without her mother—what kind of child will this be?”

I think of the younger me, the one who threw herself around on the floor and flooded my grandparents’ apartment in tears every day, pleading to anyone who would listen to bring my parents back home. And then I think about my grandmother, the same woman who loves Dream of the Red Chamber and the tragic story of Lin Daiyu, and who must love me. In what ways did she throw herself on the floor after I left? In what ways did she cry for me? In what ways did she plead?

A grandmother without her granddaughter—what kind of grandmother will this be?

On our most recent phone call, Nai Nai asked when she would be able to read the book in Chinese. I didn’t know how to explain to her all the ins and outs of translation and foreign distribution rights, so I just said, “Hopefully soon.”

She accepted this with her steady logic. “For now,” she said, “I will have to listen to what others say and believe that it is good. But it cannot really be good, not until I read it for myself. You know this, don’t you?”

I laughed, a real laugh this time. I couldn’t tell if she was making a joke or not, but it didn’t matter. We both knew that what she said must be true.

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